Q&A: Anti-piracy ruling will have huge impact: Attorney

By Mark Sutherland

LONDON (Billboard) - "It's been a busy week," deadpanned Jo Oliver, several days after a Swedish court sentenced four men behind the notorious BitTorrent tracker site the Pirate Bay to a year in jail each, after they were found guilty of assisting in making copyrighted material available.

The sentence represented a key victory for the recording industry in its fight against piracy following recent setbacks, including the rejection or withdrawal of "three strikes"-type laws in France and New Zealand. It's a fight Oliver has been leading since becoming the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's general counsel in June 2008, after two years of heading the trade organization's litigation department.

A New Zealander who has retained her accent despite years working in London and New York, Oliver has been at the forefront of the IFPI's attempts to get Internet service providers (ISPs) to take responsibility for piracy on their networks, as well as pursuing peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing sites in international courts. She says that the dual approach will continue, arguing that the Pirate Bay verdict will have a crucial "deterrent impact on others that would engage in this sort of activity."

Oliver was tight-lipped about which sites the IFPI is targeting next -- "We wouldn't want to announce our secret plan to Billboard," she quipped -- but talked happily about the Pirate Bay case and its implications.

Billboard: You obviously won the argument inside the courtroom, but in light of the pro-Pirate Bay protests in Sweden, do you feel you won it outside as well?

Jo Oliver: The individuals behind the Pirate Bay have certainly been able to paint themselves as Internet freedom fighters, and they have some public sympathy with a certain portion of, in particular, the Swedish population. But we certainly think that, throughout this trial, there has been less and less sympathy for that position because it's become clear that these guys were deliberately engaged in this operation. It wasn't something they were doing for fun on the side in their bedrooms. It was a commercial enterprise. They intended to facilitate copyright infringement, they intended to make money from it, and they did.

Billboard: What kind of precedent does it set?

Oliver: It will have a huge impact, particularly against BitTorrent sites and services. In cases like Grokster in the U.S., U.S. law doesn't apply everywhere, but that was a hugely influential decision (by the United States Supreme Court in 2005, which led to Grokster's closing of its site), and peer-to-peer services don't operate in the same way anymore because of that decision. I think the same will apply to BitTorrent services following the Pirate Bay decision.